How to Deal with Ranked Anxiety in LoL
Transcript
G'day I'm UberGiantsBro and today I'm going to show you how to deal with ranked anxiety in League of Legends. I used to have ranked anxiety back in season 1 about when the season 1 rewards were announced because this made take ranked more seriously. Now this anxiety made me a toxic player, believe it or not.
I stopped enjoying playing the game because it just made me angry and I only started enjoying League again when I was able to deal with my anxiety through some advice my older brother gave me that I'll show you in this video. After that I'll tell you 3 of THE most important things you should always remember when approaching ranked games so keep watching.
Now before I fixed my anxiety there was a big hurdle that I had to overcome. I'm not a psychologist and I'm not going to explain to you how the brain works or anything like that but one of the things I had to realise was that it was okay for me to be angry. What wasn't okay was how I expressed it. The main challenge for me in dealing with my anxiety was not to stop myself getting angry but to focus more on other emotions, the ones that help me play better and let me improve.
So I would still get angry but instead of raging at others I would focus harder on my game, concentrate on what I could do better next time and use that anger as motivation to improve myself.
Now this small change in my mindset had a massive impact on how I played and thought about the game. I started enjoying the game more. And because I was enjoying the game more, I was more motivated to improve as a player and learn from my mistakes and I went from about 1600 elo (which was gold) in season 1 to around 2200 elo in season 2 on the NA server with 200 ping.
It was like the dam of improvement was unblocked and all the elo came rushing out. I'm not boasting about my elo but just giving you an example of how a small change in your mentality can make the biggest difference in your overall skill and improvement as a player.
So obviously not everyone will have the same anxiety or the same goal in League of Legends but if you're hitting a wall in your improvement, or you're "stuck in elo hell" or WHATEVER, it might be because you're focusing on the wrong thing. You could be getting bogged down in your anger like I was or you could frustrated at the afkers and this stops from you improving (because you're no longer concentrating on improving!), or you could be scared of even playing ranked because of the ragers you've heard about. These are just some examples of ranked anxiety you might be dealing with.
Whatever the cause for your ranked anxiety is, there's a couple things you should remember;
1. League of Legends is just a game.
As cliche as that sounds and as funny as those jokes like chicks dig elo are at the end of the day that's all League of Legends is. It's a game. And unless you're a professional at League of Legends or trying to get into the pro scene and you need the higher rank to get scouted or whatever then your ranking is only for you. If you have pressure or issues in real life that are giving you anxiety, please deal with them directly.
2. You have time to increase your rank.
Now unless you're racing for a higher tier to get an end of season reward or you're studying League of Legends and your homework is to get silver by next week, remember that you have TIME to increase your rank. In the overall context of you playing League of Legends, it doesn't really matter if you lost that long ranked game or even that placement series (FOR WHATEVER REASON), what does matter is that you LEARN from it so that you're more likely to win next time. Focus on one simple thing you can get better at and your rank will soon follow.
3. If you're *THAT* good, you will get to where you belong eventually.
Unfortunately this might make you realise that you're not as good as you believe you are. But that's okay, because like I said before, all it takes is a shift in mentality to focusing on your mistakes and improving instead of getting angry about afkers or how bad your team is. I once made a new account along with my brother who's also challenger. We leveled it up from scratch and only played with eachother for fun and jumped straight into ranked when we had the minimum characters. We got to challenger in X games, and people around us were amazed to see us rank up that fast. But the thing is, we weren't, we knew that it was only a matter of time like I said in point 2.
We had about 5 4v5's on the way up to challenger and we even won a couple of them, but we weren't angry at the others because we knew that in the context of things a loss here or there didn't really matter because we would get to challenger anyway. I mained Heimerdinger and he mained Warwick for the most part.
Now, continuing on from point 2 and 3 where I say it's only a matter of time, you might be saying "well it's going to take forever because I struggle to see my own mistakes and I don't have that much time in the first place". Great. That's why myself and my two brothers have put hours and hours into creating the most complete League of Legends guide out there so that you can save yourself time.
If you're gold and below and value your time and would like to speed up your improvement then check out Summoner School at thelolguide.com If you're above gold you can still learn from it but there are basic concepts covered in the guide which you might want to skip over.
That's all for this video on how to deal with Ranked anxiety in LoL, please thumb it up if you learned from it or enjoyed it and until next time all the best in solo queue.